To continue our discussion about Defining the Problem, I spoke with Jamie Hoover, the first full-time designer hired at eBay and now the design lead at Amazon’s A9. During his tenure at eBay, Jamie helped establish a methodology (that as far as I know is still in use today) for reframing business “problems” through design -in particular through large-scale visual narratives. One of his first and biggest successes was the redesign of eBay’s registration system…

Q: As you know, I've been discussing how designers can help to define problems, not just solutions. One of the best examples that comes to mind is your work on the first significant redesign of eBay's registration process. Can you talk about how that initiative came about? What were you guys trying to achieve?

The usage of custom fonts in web pages have steadily increased in recent years. As of this writing, 68% of sites in the HTTP Archive use at least one custom font. At eBay, we have been discussing custom web fonts for typography for quite some time, but never really pursued it. The main reason was due to uncertainty in end user experiences from a performance standpoint. But this changed recently.

Our design team made a strong case for a custom font to complement our new branding and, after multiple reviews, we all agreed it makes sense. Now it was on the engineering team to come up with an optimized implementation that not only uses the new custom font, but also tackles the performance overhead. This post gives a quick overview of the strategy we use at eBay to load custom web fonts.

Right on the npm website, the very first sentence starts with "npm", and they do not capitalize it.

That's a pretty good precedent for not capitalizing it. It certainly looks awkward though, which is why I asked the question to begin with. It doesn't feel right to me to start a sentence that way, and I'm sure other some other people would look at it and see a mistake.